The present invention relates to a photographic system including a method and apparatus for producing high density photographic records or fiche of slides and other material which may be copied by photographic techniques.
The duplication of slides and other photographic material is an increasingly necessary, important and time consuming project. Color photograph techniques employing sophisticated color reversal film, has been commercially feasible only since the end of World War II. It has therefore only recently become known that the archival life of these color materials is extremely limited; color transparencies retained in light-tight closed files fade and disappear without about 25 years if kept at room temperature. For this reason valuable color transparency libraries now face extinction unless they are preserved at extremely low temperatures (0.degree. Farenheit or below).
Cold storage of the originals is not feasible unless a high quality color reproduction of reasonable cost can be manufactured. One object of the present invention is therefore to provide a method and apparatus for making high quality reproduction of multiples of camera original photographs which, whether they are continuous tone black and white or color, are of sufficient quality to be themselves reproduced. At the same time these reproductions are rationalized and integrated in multiples on a single copy sheet.
A second problem in the photography industry is the sheer volume of photographs and photographically recorded material that must be preserved, yet kept conveniently available. Microfilm and microfiche have been used in the past to solve storage problems in specialized areas; namely textual material and date recordation, but high quality reduction and recordation techniques for photographs and slides have heretofore not been commercially possible.
Furthermore, duplication of 35 millimeter slides, the most common form of camera original color transparencies in existance throughout the world, poses an especially perplexing problem. Because the image or film is carried in an opaque mounting frame which is several times larger than the image, the ratio of the film image area to opaque mounting frame area is low. The slide thus has a low information ratio or information density. The straight-forward duplication of slides placed adjacent one another produces a copy having an equally low information ratio, because although the actual size may be reduced, the ratio of image frame to mounting frame remains constant. Additionally, any jig or frame utilized to facilitate the handling and positioning of the slides in the duplication apparatus, increases the blank area between the slide and further lowers the information density of the produced copy.
The present invention provides a method and apparatus for reproducing a group of camera-original transparencies of any size into a second integrated group of images. The integrated reproduced images may be of any selected size; limited only by the reproduction quality desired relative to the original quality and size of the transparency.